VAR for thought

For a moment let’s ignore the looming global financial crisis and European Union debt refinancing, ignore the fact that Apple is now worth more than Exxon Mobil or more than the 32 largest banks in Europe (combined!), ignore the terrible PC shipments and outlook from Dell, even ignore Microsoft and virtually every other SMB PC company that’s killing it’s channel program. I think each of those is a blog post of it’s own and it’s something that Kate @ http://www.lookscloudy.com has been covering rather well – but the present is not really what’s all that relevant to your future business development.

Let’s for a moment look at the consumerisation of IT and it’s impact on VARs. It’s a concept and a word so foreign to the Microsoft VAR that even Microsoft spell check can’t hold back it’s red squigly underline and the audience reacts like this:

The biggest news of this past week was not that HP decided to kill the OuchPad (Artist formerly known as TouchPad).

The biggest news of this past week was not even that HP has decided to spin off (read: for the love of god, someone take this boulder off our shoulders) it’s PC business.

The biggest news of this past week has been what HP intends to do to continue growing it’s business.

Apparently, it’s not this. Remarkably, they are so convinced it’s not this that they are willing to sell out the whole inventory for $100, which is less than you’d even pay for a digital photo frame.

The biggest “corporate” challenge to iPad failed so hard and so abruptly that HP is still running nationwide tablet commercials even after they have massacred the product.

What does HP defeated in the area of consumer electronics and disparaged in the nearly $4 billion dollar computer business think it will do in the future? Apparently, it’s enterprise services. What about you?

Here is the billion dollar (or million dollar depending on your aspirations) challenge for the VARs:

Are big box PC makers just criminally mismanaged in a sense that they not only believe they will never catch the iPad but that indeed their best PC years of selling hardware and networking are over?

Regardless of the correct answer to that question, the biggest marketing backers of the SMB VAR (including the partner purging Microsoft) are throwing in the towel and getting in the IT services.

To which the obvious question becomes, what exactly are you going to be managing a few years from now if all your vendors are either calling it quits or competing against you?

I’ll withhold my opinion for the time being and let you ponder on this as quietly or as loudly as you wish.

I will however offer this parting thought: Q1-Q2 and what I have of Q3 so far marks a higher decline in overall VAR activity than we’ve seen just around the Bush recession and financial collapse in 2008. Yet, profitability and revenues are higher than ever before. Simply put, people that are contemplating stuff are dying. People that are working are thriving. With the more apparent shift in the relevance of IT services, what does your business look like 2-3 years out? What are you adding value to in order to get paid if even your existing vendors don’t see themselves in their business lines anymore or show a bleak outlook?

Food for thought indeed.